I am starting to get concerned about the future of PCSX2(and Dolphin for that matter), and games that require a high clock rate to run smoothly. All this talk of overclock overclock overclock..... We are hitting an unwanted glass ceiling people. PCSX2 is a FANTASTIC emulator, but quite a few of the games it runs requires a lot of CPU power and a high clock speed. But both Intel and nVidia have already stated they have NO plans to release any processors that offer significant increase in clock rates over the now standard 3xGhz stock speed. The improvements on their chips will come with more cores and increased cache. None of which will significantly help the speed of games running in pcsx2. I would like to know what the devs' long term plans are for improving speed? If some games require a huge clock rate or 5.0Ghz or higher, and Intel and AMD have upcoming processors with *no* stock clock speeds over 3.xGhz on the horizon, how are we going to get around this dilema?

Frequency depends on architecture. Bulldozer cpu will probably have a higher clocker speed than current phenom II (bigger pipeline). So you can expect 4Ghz But the real question is : will it be more efficient ? Emulation comes with a (big) overhead, so you need a powerful cpu.

It is true they add more core. However, turbo technology (aka multiple core downclock) allow to run 1-2 core with higher frequency.

Another trend is APU (CPU + GPU) (actually the emotion engine is an APU). It can maybe help the emulator. It will enable cpu to have more powerful vector unit, it could help to emulate the vector unit of the ps2. Moreover APU could save a lots of memory transfer, instead of copying in the graphical memory, you could copy it in the memory (much more faster) or just the original without copy.

The GS plugin needs fast memory transfer. There are still improvement on this side. Maybe one day, we will have a nice dmac on x86... For the moment it will be ddr4 and probably ddr5 later.

PS Pentium 4 was proven a bad design. So it is not "difficult" to have somethings more efficient

PCSX2 still has much room for speed improvements. Even if CPUs never get any faster, PCSX2 will eventually be able to run all but the most evil of games at full speed on current PC hardware (Core2 @ 3.2ghz, HD5770 or GTX260). Its just going to take time to get the code to that point, and retain compatibility.

Just because right now you need a high clock rate to emulate PS2 games doesn't mean you always will! Right now PCSX2 is in development, meaning it is not full optimized, and there is still room for better programming (not that the developers haven't done AMAZING so far... ) and with time, we will need less clock rates for the same things to be done.

Example, new games like Starcraft 2, in their development phase, would have maybe needed a 10ghz processor to run smoothly, but with refinement, finesse, and a pinch of zest, it can now run in a 2.4ghz processor with ease.

...Plus if I can run games smoothly on my 2.3ghz OC'd E2140, I'm pretty sure a 3ghz processor will blow that out of the water~ :3